St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)

by Karen Armstrong

The emperors respected the antiquity and morality of Israelite religion and had granted Jewish communities a degree of autonomy in the Greco-Roman cities. But this was often resented by local elites who were smarting under their own loss of independence, so periodically anti-Jewish tension erupted among the townsfolk. To counter this, some Greek-speaking Jews had developed a militant diaspora consciousness that they called ioudaismos, a defiant assertion of ancestral tradition combined with a determination to preserve a distinctly Jewish identity and forestall any political threat to their community—resorting to violence,

But other Greek-speaking Jews may have found life in the Holy City disappointing. In the diaspora, many had come to appreciate Hellenistic culture. They tended, therefore, to stress the universality inherent in Jewish monotheism, seeing the One God as the Father of all peoples, who was worshiped under different names. Some also believed that the Torah was not the possession of the Jews alone but that in their own way the ancestral laws of the Greeks and Romans also expressed the will of the One God.

They probably found the Pharisees’ preoccupations stifling and petty, and they may also have been offended by the commercial exploitation of pilgrims in the Holy City.9 So when they heard the Twelve talking about Jesus, they would have been drawn to some of his teachings. For instance, he was said to have been critical of the Pharisees: “You pay tithes of mint and rue and every garden herb but neglect justice and the love of God. It is these you should have practiced, without overlooking the other.”

“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”

When they joined the Jesus movement, these Greek-speaking Jews continued to pray in their own synagogues. But, Luke tells us, tension broke out between the Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking members.

gentile world. In Luke’s story, this trivial dispute about food escalated with horrifying speed to a lynching in which Stephen was killed. Some of the diaspora Jews who were committed to ioudaismos were incensed by Stephen’s liberal preaching and had him dragged before the high priest.

When Stephen finally cried, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” his accusers were filled with rage and, flinging their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, they hustled Stephen out of the city to stone him. “Saul,” Luke ends this tragic tale, “was among those who approved of this execution.”16

Paul enters the story probably about two years after Jesus’s death, in 32/33. We know almost nothing about his early life. It is Luke who tells us that he came originally from Tarsus and was brought by his parents to Jerusalem as a boy. Paul

Ever since the second century BCE, Pharisees had been political activists, ready to die and sometimes to kill for their convictions.

Paul made it clear that he had been a particularly zealous Pharisee: “In the practice of ioudaismos, I outstripped most of my Jewish contemporaries by my boundless devotion to the traditions of my ancestors.”19

God’s punishment for their failure to observe the Torah. They concluded that instead of defying the Roman authorities and endangering the Jewish community, it was better to devote themselves to observing the commandments stringently, trusting that God would ultimately reward their fidelity. Only thus could they hasten the Messianic Age in which God would restore the honor of his people.20 This was probably Paul’s view; he seems to have been a recognized Pharisaic leader and may have instructed diaspora Jews residing in Jerusalem to resist assimilation to the Greco-Roman ethos and avoid any anti-Roman activity that might lead to military reprisals.

But for Paul, the Hellenistic followers of Jesus were insulting everything he believed to be most sacred, and he greatly feared that their devotion to a man executed so recently by the Roman authorities would put the entire community at risk. Paul himself had never had any dealings with Jesus before his death, but he would have been horrified to learn that Jesus had desecrated the temple and argued that some of God’s laws were more important than others. For a Pharisee with extreme views, like Paul, a Jew who did not observe every single one of the commandments was endangering the Jewish people, since God could punish such infidelity as severely as he had punished the ancient Israelites in the time of Moses.

True, his followers insisted that Jesus had been buried on the day of his death, but Paul was well aware that most Roman soldiers had little respect for Jewish sensibilities and might well have left Jesus’s body hanging on his cross to be consumed by birds of prey. Even though this was no fault of his own, such a man was an abomination and had defiled the Land of Israel.26 To imagine that these desecrated remains had been raised to the right hand of God was abhorrent, unthinkable, and blasphemous. It impugned the honor of God and his people and would delay the longed-for coming of the Messiah, so it was, Paul believed, his duty to eradicate this sect.

“he entered house after house, seizing men and women and sending them to prison.”27 He did not shrink from brute force and would later remind his followers of “how savagely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy [eporthoun] it,” the Greek verb implying utter annihilation.28 Some of his victims may have been condemned to thirty-nine lashes in the synagogue; others may have been beaten up or even lynched like Stephen, until finally the Greek-speaking community of Jesus’s followers had been eliminated from Jerusalem.

Some became active in the synagogues of Damascus, and when he heard this, Luke tells us that Paul, still “breathing murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples,” applied to the high priest for permission to arrest them and bring them back to Jerusalem for punishment.31

Luke says that just before Paul reached the city he was thrown from his horse and blinded by a light from the sky. He heard a voice asking: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” When Paul asked who the speaker was, the voice replied, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” and instructed him to await further directions in Damascus.35 Luke certainly expressed an essential aspect of Paul’s conversion: He had suddenly discovered the terrible paradox of his position. Later he would try to explain the dilemma of the die-hard fanatic he had once been: “The good which I want to do, I fail to do, but what I do is the wrong which is against my will!”

As if this were not enough, his violence had broken the fundamental principles of the Torah: love of God and love of neighbor. In his excessive ardor for the law’s integrity, he had forgotten God’s stern command: “Thou shalt not kill.” “In my inmost self, I delight in the law of God, but I perceive in my actions a different law, fighting against the law that my mind approves,” he would reflect later on his predicament. “Wretched creature that I am, who is there to rescue me from this state of death? Who but God?”37 By

But in some respects, Luke’s view of the Damascus experience was very different from Paul’s. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke calls it a “vision” (orama), an “ecstasy” (ekstasis), or an “apparition” (optasia), but when he described the encounters of Jesus’s disciples with the risen Christ in his gospel, he did not use any of these words. These earlier sightings, Luke believed, had been objective, physical events. Jesus had walked, talked, and eaten with them just as he did before the crucifixion. Paul’s “vision” experience bore no resemblance to this.

In short, Luke did not regard Paul as a witness to the resurrection in the same way as the Twelve. But for Paul, the most important thing about his experience was that he actually did see the Lord and that Jesus appeared to him in exactly the same way as he had appeared to the Twelve.38 It was a controversial claim and would often be contested. For Paul, an apostle was someone who had seen the risen Christ. “Am I not an apostle?” he would demand. “Have I not seen the Lord?”39

This was not a conversion in the usual sense, since Paul was not changing his religion. He would regard himself as a Jew for the rest of his life and he understood the Damascus revelation in entirely Jewish terms: He had been called in just the same way as God had called Isaiah; God had selected Paul, like Jeremiah, when he was still in his mother’s womb.41

In the celestial flight experience, a Jewish mystic induced his visions, engaging in lengthy preparations—fasting and sitting for hours with his head between his knees, murmuring the divine praises.47 But there was no such preparation for the Damascus vision, which came to Paul out of the blue, “when no one expected it.”

Jesus’s physical ascension was not without precedent: Adam, Enoch, Moses, and Elijah were all said to have been carried bodily into Heaven; mystics saw them there sitting on golden thrones. After the prophet Ezekiel had been deported to Babylon in 597, he had a vision of Yahweh that made an indelible impression on the Jewish imagination. He had seen the God of Israel, leaving the Holy Land and traveling to join the exiles in a war chariot drawn by four strange beasts. High above their heads, Ezekiel saw something that defied normal categorization. It “looked like a sapphire, it was shaped like a throne and high up on this throne was a being that looked like a man.” This humanlike figure was surrounded by a nimbus of fire and light that “looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”49 One could never see God himself—that lay beyond human capacity—but it was possible to glimpse God’s “glory,” a kind of afterglow of the divine presence adapted to the limitations of human perception.

Instead of calling his encounter with Jesus in Damascus a vision, Paul experienced it as an apocalupsis, a “revelation.”53 Like the Latin revelatio, the Greek apocalupsis meant “unveiling.” A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before. At Damascus, it seemed to Paul as though scales had been removed from his eyes and he had an entirely new insight into the nature of God.

Pharisee had to purify himself if he had any physical contact with a corpse, because the God that was life itself could have nothing to do with the corruption of death. But when Paul saw that God had embraced Jesus’s filthy, degraded body and raised it to the highest place in Heaven, he realized that in fact God had an entirely different set of values. In honoring Jesus in this way, God had signaled a change in the way he approached humanity. To a man sentenced to death by Roman law, God had said: “Sit at my right hand and I will make your enemies a footstool for you.”

God had chosen “to reveal his Son to me for the exact purpose that I might preach him among the gentiles.”54 When Paul saw the ritually defiled body of Jesus at God’s right hand, he understood exactly why he had received this mission. He had chosen to live in the Holy Land because the gentile world was unclean. Jews tended to regard the non-Jewish nations as impure and morally inferior. But in raising Jesus, God had shown that he did not judge by these earthly standards and that he stood by people who were despised and denigrated by the rules and laws of this world. God had no favorites. It was now time to bring the knowledge of the One God to the pagan nations.

The Galatians had to liberate themselves from habits of servility and ethnic prejudice by creating an alternative community characterized by equality. This community was what Paul meant by life “in Christ.” He would call his congregations ekklesiai (“assemblies”), regarding them as an implicit challenge to the official ekklesiai of local aristocrats that ruled the population of each province as Rome’s representatives.

Paul urged the Galatians to create a legal system that united people rather than dividing them into classes and gave equal value to everybody without exception. “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment: love your neighbor as yourself,” he urged them.19 They must transcend the reptilian passions that divided them: “envy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissensions, party intrigues, and jealousies.”20 The law of self-emptying love was “the law of Christ.”

we know why they chose Macedonia as their next mission field, arriving in Philippi in the year 50. This too was a very different world for Paul. Founded in 356 BCE by Philip of Macedonia, the city had become the center of the gold-mining industry that had funded the campaigns of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great. The mines had long since been exhausted, but Philippi had become the chief Roman outpost on the Via Egnatia, the overland route linking the capital with the eastern provinces.

After the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), which established Augustus as the sole ruler of the empire, more veterans arrived. This was, therefore, a Romanized city with an

excavations show that at the time of Paul’s visit, Philippi, still a tiny urban enclave comprising only a quarter of a square mile, was merely an administrative center.

In Philippi, Paul encountered a particularly intense form of the deification of the Roman emperor. While he was preaching in Macedonia, Claudius, who had sternly forbidden his subjects to build temples in his honor at the beginning of his reign, had begun to promote his cult in the provinces and, like Augustus, had assumed the title “savior of the world.”

in Paul’s time, religion and political life were so intertwined that it was impossible to say where one began and the other ended. The followers of Jesus were not the only ones to proclaim the “good news” that a new age was dawning. “A great new cycle of centuries begins!” the poet Virgil exclaimed. “Justice returns to earth, the golden age returns.”25

These claims were more credible in the ancient world than they would be today, since no vast ontological gulf separated the human from the divine: Men and women regularly became gods and vice versa. Studies have shown that the sacrifices to the emperor’s genius (“divine spirit”) were not empty rituals but the means by which the subject peoples conceptualized the power that now ruled the known world, helping them to make sense of the intrusion of Rome into their lives by drawing on familiar imagery and concepts of kingship.

Most significantly, the cult was not forced on the provinces by the Roman Senate but was enthusiastically embraced by the local aristocracies. They actually vied with one another in building temples and shrines to the reigning emperor and erecting inscriptions praising his achievements.

Imperial rituals saturated every aspect of public life in the provinces, invading public space in rather the same way as the sights

Aristocrats not only paid for these sacrifices but also officiated in the emperor cult as priests, the highest status symbol of all. The cult gained such wide acceptance that

Emperor worship was far more prominent in the Land of Japheth than in Syria and Cilicia, so it would have made a painful impression on Paul, not simply because it was religiously offensive but because of its political and social implications. Macedonia and Achaea had been conquered originally by military force, but, unlike Judea and Galatia, these provinces were now so completely pacified that there was no need for Rome to establish a military presence there and the capital could rely on the loyalty of the local ruling class.

When Augustus had become the sole ruler of the empire, he had called for a return to traditional Roman values, especially pietas, duty to family and country. He presented himself to the citizens of Rome as their father and patron, manifesting his paternal devotion in massive public benefactions. In return, he expected his subjects’ loyalty (pistis). In the provinces too, the local elite depicted their emperor as the benevolent bringer of peace and security whose rule was blessed by the gods, so the conquered peoples were expected to love their subjugation. But Paul would soon have become aware of the structural injustice of the Roman system, which created an unbridgeable social chasm between the aristocratic ruling class and the common people.

The masses were expected to show their deference to their superiors in myriad stylized rituals in the course of a single day. And the ubiquitous spectacle of the cross was a reminder of what could happen if you stepped out of line and laid bare the cruelty on which this supposedly benign system depended.

The hymn stated clearly that unlike the emperor, who did seek “equality with god” (isa theo), Jesus had not tried to “grasp” this distinction himself; his elevation to the divine realm had been entirely God’s initiative to reward Jesus for his humble acceptance of death on a Roman cross.

Instead of engaging in the tireless self-promotion of the elite, they must imitate the kenosis of Jesus. “Leave no room for selfish ambition or vanity, but humbly reckon others better than yourselves. Look to each other’s interests and not merely your own.”

Thessalonica. Since 146 BCE, the city had been the capital of the province of Macedonia and the emperor cult was strong there. The Thessalonian aristocrats honored their powerful Roman patrons alongside their own gods in inscriptions, public oratory, and festivals.37 During the first century BCE, the goddess Roma had been added to the local pantheon, with her own priesthood, and a temple was built for Augustus.

Here too Paul founded an ekklesia that was a direct challenge to the citizens’ assembly of the elite, since it comprised artisans and laborers in the lower echelons of the stratified urban economy.

Claudius had recently expelled from Rome Jews who may have been members of the Jesus movement, because, the historian Suetonius explained, they were agitating in the name of one “Chrestus.” But Paul was not in favor of such overt action. Instead, the Thessalonians should wait peaceably for Jesus’s return. In this interim period, he told them, “live quietly and attend to your own business . . . so that you may command the respect of those outside your own numbers.”46 Yes, they were indeed the children of light grappling with the forces of darkness, but they were armed only with spiritual weapons: “the breastplate of faith and love, and the hope of salvation for a helmet.”47

He describes Paul preaching before the Council of the Areopagus like a Greek philosopher, arguing from the evidence of natural reason for the existence of a God, praised by Greek poets as “not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move, in him we exist.”49 Paul had little time for Greek wisdom, however, and it is more likely that Luke was describing what he himself would have said had he had the good luck to speak in Athens, even though by this time its golden age was long past.

Paul was more interested in the modern cities of the empire, and in the autumn of 50 CE, he arrived in Corinth, the most prosperous city of Achaea. The ancient polis had resisted Roman expansion in 146 BCE and had been totally destroyed, lying in ruins for over a century as a stark reminder of the price of opposition to Rome. In 44 BCE, Julius Caesar had rebuilt and repopulated Corinth with freed slaves, and under Augustus it became the capital of the province of Achaea, with a proconsul as governor.

But Paul would have noticed the glaring disparity between their opulent neighborhoods and the crowded workshops and impoverished industrial quarters where he and his disciples lived. In Corinth, he became even more aware of the structural violence of the Roman patronage system, in which the local ruling class dominated all lines of communication with Rome and controlled the scarce resources of wealth, power, and prestige. Acquiring a powerful patron, either at home or in Rome, was the only route to advancement. Like the imperial cult, the patronage system bound the Roman Empire together. A patron would collect clients to boost his own status with his peers; he would promise to help these dependents, but his power lay in his ability to refuse or delay such assistance, keeping his clients dependent and in suspense. Because most of the poor were tied in this way to the wealthy families, the system thus became an instrument of social control that was contingent on its inequity.

They all vied with one another to display their loyalty to the emperor by participating enthusiastically in his cult. There was no pretense of parity in these friendships, since accepting clientage was itself a tacit admission of inferiority. Lesser aristocrats and freedmen competed with one another by building their own networks of loyal clients from the lower classes. As the Roman senator and historian Tacitus explained, the “good” people in a city were defined by their attachment and pistis to the great families, while the “bad” took no part in the patronage system, either because they had nothing to offer the rich or because they deliberately avoided this humiliating subordination.51

Paul cast himself as one of the “bad” people in Corinth by persistently refusing to accept any financial support from local patrons.

God, Paul told the Corinthians, had “chosen things without rank or standing in the world, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order.”54 By executing the Messiah, the powers that be had condemned themselves to destruction. The Messiah was now enthroned at the right hand of God, preparing to depose “every sovereignty, authority, and power.”55 In Corinth, the cross was central to Paul’s message.